In a new article for The Conversation, economist-turned-professor Robert H. Nelson uses laws of math, science, and the human condition to make the case that God must exist.
While statistics show people’s belief in God is on the decline, Nelson, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland, believes the “probability for the existence of a supernatural god” is actually on the rise.
An economist by trade, Nelson has been interested in the intersection of things like “physics, the philosophy of human consciousness, evolutionary biology, mathematics, the history of religion, and theology” since the 1990s, penning the 2015 book God? Very Probably: Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of a God. In looking at those disciplines, he has determined that God likely exists.
Nelson breaks down his pro-God argument for The Conversation into six distinct sections, ranging from “The Laws of Math” to “The Mystery of the Human Consciousness.” In looking at the mathematics, he cites Nobel Prize winner Eugene Winger, who once raised the “fundamental question”: Why did the natural world always–so far as we know–obey laws of mathematics?
Winger speculated that “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it,” and Nelson agrees. As is further argued in his book, he writes, “it takes the existence of some kind of a god to make the mathematical underpinnings of the universe comprehensible.”
Similarly, Nelson deems the workings of human consciousness “miraculous.”
“Like the laws of mathematics, consciousness has no physical presence in the world; the images and thoughts in our consciousness have no measurable dimensions,” he writes. “Yet, our nonphysical thoughts somehow mysteriously guide the actions of our physical human bodies. This is no more scientifically explicable than the mysterious ability of nonphysical mathematical constructions to determine the workings of a separate physical world.”
Also miraculous, in Nelson’s reasoning, is the fact that “world-transforming ideas” like “Buddhism, Confucianism, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and the Hebrew Old Testament” seemingly appeared “at about the same time” in India, China, Greece and the Middle East, despite the fact that those groups of people had “little interaction with one another.”
“That all these astonishing things happened within the conscious workings of human minds, functioning outside physical reality, offers further rational evidence,” he says, “for the conclusion that human beings may well be made ‘in the image of [a] God.’”
Read the entire article HERE.
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